Work

Capturing Intra-Dialectal Variation in Qatari Arabic: A Corpus of Cultural and Gender Dimensions

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: We present the first publicly available, multidimensional corpus of Qatari Arabic, which captures intra-dialectal variation across Urban and Bedouin speakers.Although often grouped under the label "Gulf Arabic", Qatari Arabic exhibits rich phonological, lexical, and discourselevel differences shaped by gender, age, and sociocultural identity.Our dataset includes aligned speech and transcriptions from 255 speakers, stratified by gender and age, and collected through structured interviews on culturally important topics such as education, heritage, and social norms.The corpus reveals systematic variation in pronunciation, vocabulary, and narrative style, offering insights for both sociolinguistic analysis and computational modeling.We also demonstrate its utility through preliminary experiments in predicting dialects and genders.This work provides the first large-scale, demographically balanced corpus of Qatari Arabic, laying a foundation for both sociolinguistic research and the development of dialect-aware NLP systems.

Source: Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP)

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2025.arabicnlp-main.18

Authors: Houda Bouamor, Sara Al-Emadi, Zeinab Ibrahim, Hany Fazzaa, Aisha Al-Sultan

Institutions: Carnegie Mellon University Qatar, Carnegie Mellon University, Hamad bin Khalifa University, Georgetown University in Qatar

Language: English

Topic: Linguistic Variation and Morphology

Subfield: Linguistics and Language

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funders: Qatar Foundation, Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg, Qatar National Research Fund

Award: G2894603144